Game Voice Evolution: RTC SDK, In-Game Voice, and Immersive Audio

1. Unveiling the Evolution of Game Voice

Social networking now is an essential aspect of gaming experiences. On one hand, gaming is inherently a social activity that offers a range of topics and scenarios for social interaction. On the other hand, social networking fulfills our human nature and improves the gaming experiences, which can significantly increase player retention.

As an important feature of social networking, game voice has drawn growing attention from game developers and gained considerable popularity among players. There are myriads of game voice applications and solutions in the market, which provide a wide variety of features. Below is an overview of the evolution of game voice.

Game voice tools have evolved with the development of the internet. The last 20+ years have witnessed huge leaps in game voice technology：

• from support for a single platform to cross-platform interoperability.
• from one-to-one chat to interactive voice chat in a room with tens of thousands of online users.
• from third-party voice communication SaaS tools to PaaS SDKs.
• from monotonous voice chat to immersive voice experiences.

Instead of following a chronological order or revisiting the evolution of their features, this article looks at the development of game voice tools from the perspective of game voice experiences.

The most basic experience brought by game voice is that players communicate with each other through voice chat. Gaming creates a virtual world where the dialog between players is actually that between game characters. In tandem with the improvements in gameplay design and image quality, players have higher expectations of voice chat, and the voice experience similar to a conference call can no longer meet their demand. In response, a disruptive technical solution has emerged, which is called "Immersive Voice Solution".

Game voice technology has gone through several stages, starting from the most basic voice chat to immersive voice experiences and beyond. As breakthroughs in sensors, computing power, audio algorithms, IoT, and other technologies are on the horizon, all-real voice will eventually become a reality, delivering the ultimate voice experience the metaverse demands.

2. Version Iterations

/ 2.1 Game voice v1.0: Third-party voice chat tools

At this stage, players use third-party voice chat tools to communicate with each other in the process of gaming. Whether the game itself offers a voice communication feature or not, using third-party tools allows players to quickly create chat channels and communicate with each other through voice chat.

/ 2.2 Game voice v2.0: In-game voice